al young soul, and had not yet developed the American disease
which consists in thinking of two things at the same time. John Henry
had it badly, for he had been thinking of the tangent-balance, his wife,
his boy, and the coming Christmas, all together, since he had got home,
and the three problems had got mixed and had made his head ache.

Nevertheless he looked up from his work-table and smiled when his son
came in.

"Everything all right?" he asked, with an attempt to be cheerful.

"Oh yes, fine," answered the boy, looking at the motionless model for
the five-hundredth time, and sticking his hands into his pockets. "I'm
only third in mathematics yet, but I'm head in everything else. I wish I
had your brains, father! I'd be at the head of the arithmetic class in
half a shake of a lamb's tail if I had your brains."

So far as mathematics were concerned this sounded probable to John
Henry, who would have considered the speed of the tail to be a variable
function of lamb, depending on the value of mother, plus or minus milk.

"Well," he said in an encouraging tone, "I never could remember
geography, so it makes us even."

"I'd like to know how!" cried the boy in a tone of protest. "You could
do sums, and you grew up to be a great mathematician and inventor. But
what is the good of a geographician, anyway? They can only make
school-books. They never invent anything, do they? You can't invent
geography, can you? At least you can, and some boys do, but they go to
the bottom of the class like lead. It's safer to invent history than
geography, isn't it, father?"

Overholt's clever mouth twitched.

"It's much safer, my boy. Almost all historians have found it so."

"There! I said so to-day, and now you say just the same thing. I don't
believe one word of ancient history. Not--one--word! They wrote it about
their own nations, didn't they? All right. Then you might just as well
expect them to tell what really happened, as think that I'd tell on
another boy in my own school. I must say it would be as mean as dog pie
of them if they did, but all the same that does not make history true,
does it?"

Newton had a practical mind. His father, who had not, meditated with
unnecessary gravity on the boy's point of view and said nothing.

"For instance," continued the lad, sitting down on the high stool before
the lathe Overholt was not using, "the charge of Balaclava's a true
story, because it's been told by both sides; but th